Exodia Read Online Free PDF

Dalton. Just checking.
Everything okay?”
    I nod, let my face relax.
    “ The Executive is heading
back to his rooms, so just stay in here, uh …” The guard acts
embarrassed. “I mean, uh, if you want to see him I can let him know
you’re here.” His voice goes up like a question on the last word,
but I shake my head no. “Okay, then.” He closes the door and I let
my breath out. The last time I was in the Executive President’s
presence things had not gone well. Grandfather or not, he’s a
tyrant.
    I put the third box in and then the
fourth. Nothing on either. This is a waste of time. I walk back to
the place I found them and slide them in. I realize I left the
first one on another shelf by the window. What the heck. I grab it,
blow the dust off the metal edges and insert it once again into the
SCR. The Reader opens it again and this time I see the audio and
video options blink weakly while the reader icon glows green. I
press it.
    It opens. I begin to read:
    Pr-4-13-2051-D1
    Substantiated psychic
forecast by trained level 1 subject, drug-aided
    Corroboration by trained
level 2 administrator, unaided
    Authentication code: P-R-
1116-49-C
    Content: Executive President
Assassination Attempt, 99.999% probability of success in 24 years,
3 months, 2 days. Assassin: DOB ?/?/2077, Red parents, central
states area
    Audio content: Subject 1’s
vocalizations, trance, drug-induced utterances
    Video content A: Subject 1,
Subject 2, recorded and validated, before, during, and after
time-stamped predictions, 100% accuracy
    Video content B: Executive
Presidential order, proposed, endorsed, and voted on by Executive
Cabinet, no objections. Mandate signed.
    This must be the mandate Lydia meant:
the Culling Mandate. I try reloading the box to try to get the
video to open. I’m curious to see an actual psychic forecast. Six
or seven years ago, when I got to go along on an outer state tour,
we stayed with a military governor whose kids taught me new games.
I remember how they would play-act at predicting things, going into
trances and waving their arms around.
    The video doesn’t open.
    I hear my grandfather’s voice outside
the door, loud and angry, and I hurry to replace the box with the
other ones. I’m torn between hiding or posing myself at a desk with
an actual book, but then a door slams and the shouting stops. I
begin to search the shelves for anything else that might give me
information about the mandate, or where I was born, or why anyone
would carve my name into a wall.
    I spot a shelf with a neat pile of
ledger books. They perk my interest because of their odd placement
between the vertical lines of upright books. Their spines are
without label. I thumb through one expecting columns of numbers,
but instead I find the yellowing pages filled with poetic verse.
Priests and sheep, beasts and snakes, love and marriage. The
ledgers probably mean nothing at all, but on a whim I tear out the
first few pages of one of them and roll them ’til they fit in one
of my belt sacks. Because it’s still early I swing by the kitchen
and grab some fruit before heading to that place in the fence. I
can make it to Lydia’s house and back before our tutor
arrives.
    I climb the fence and ease myself over.
I land next to some pretty impressive paw prints and I touch both
belt sacks to remind myself which one holds my pathetic
knife.
    I notice the smells, the garbage, the
stink, but also the good scents; someone is roasting coffee,
something that is smuggled along with cacao beans. There is already
a line for water, but instead of a stream of women snaking along
the street there are six men with all kinds of contraptions for
hauling large quantities of water back to their homes. Another
group of six lingers a block away. I can tell the Blues from the
Reds, though they are low class Blues, by the way they look down
their noses at their just as poor counterparts.
    I round a corner and head up Burnell
Street. I slow a bit when I see a group of